conscience

[thir]

You put a lot of my wanderering thoughts into a frame, thanks ;-)

Yes, and this is interesting because it suggests that "conscience" is more instinctive than I would have thought, if circumstances can switch it on and off like that. In the same way that so many other instincts lie unnoticed in the backs of our minds until the right button is pressed, and suddenly we find ourselves doing something we never planned to, and thinking up reasons for it afterwards.

So, maybe consceience is instinctive - is instinct.

This also goes a long way to explaining why we commonly struggle to keep to moral rules. In the primal clan, the trigger to our conscience was right there in front of us - someone is hungry, someone is hurt, help. But as we expanded the clan to a tribe to a people to a nation to a world, the issues became ever more abstract and distant and cerebral, and more out of touch with the intinctive triggers.

I think you got it right on the nose here.

[quote]
As Desmond Morris noted, even if a disaster relief charity actually wants to drill wells or build shelters or something, the picture they use in their adverts is a hurt or hungry child, because that pushes the instinctive button that says someone needs our help.

Desmond Morris is a pompous pseudo-scientific ass, but I agree with this one.

Would we be able to survive under any circumstances like that? Not for long. The selfish and exploitative survive as parasites on the co-operative majority, and always have. If we all became parasites, like those zombie plague movies, we wouldn't have anything to live off.

Point.